LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — When it comes to putting new blood into a horror author of yore, few director-actor collaborators have made terrifying words cinematically relevant for a new generation of fear fans like Jeffrey Combs and Stuart Gordon. Indeed, H.P. Lovecraft would probably send salutations from his eldritch realm for the gorily stylish energy they injected into such adaptations of his work as Re-Animator, From Beyond and Castle Freak — films that created a new legion of Lovecraft admirers to hungrily seek out his printed work anew. Gordon, who got his start in avant-garde theater productions replete with nude Peter Pans and onstage torture, directed the wiry Combs to new realms of psychotic brilliance in these films, establishing the actor as an icon of mad science.

But Gordon and Combs didn’t stop at Lovecraft, as the actor’s supporting role in his Poe-inspired Pit and the Pendulum would ultimately lead to Combs playing the author himself for Gordon in “The Black Cat,” a Masters of Horror episode that twisted Poe’s real-life insanity into one of his most notorious stories. It’s no wonder that, with their help, Poe has continued to conjure images of shackled corpses, ever-lowering blades and quothing ravens. Yet even Poe’s own fiction could hardly match the horrific travails of his own self-destructive life, where tragedy upon tragedy led the legendary author/poet/detective/critic to a grim fate.

Now, with a book by Re-Animator co-author Dennis Paoli, Jeffrey Combs and Stuart Gordon are summing up Poe’s brilliant madness into a one-man stage play that is anything but a typically genteel “evening with,” for what starts out as Poe reciting his poetry and fictional stories ends up in a painful, near-psychotic breakdown that reveals the madness and sorrowful humanity within an author few really know beyond a rep full of lies. And for Combs/Gordon fans who’ve thrilled with their notorious screen collaborations, it’s a rare chance to experience the same chills and powerhouse performance in the flesh — an evening that both men have determined their audience won’t forget.

Daniel Schweiger: Stuart, you’re best known for all of your H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, like Re-Animator and From Beyond, but how did you first discover Edgar Allen Poe?

Stuart Gordon: Like a lot of people, I discovered Poe because of the movies that Roger Corman did with Vincent Price in the 1960s, like Tomb of Ligeia and The Pit and the Pendulum. That drew me to reading about Poe’s life, and when I was at the Organic Theater in Chicago, we did that play which tried to put it all together. The show was very successful and marked the beginning of my fascination with the author.

DS: Though you’ve mostly dealt with H.P Lovecraft together, it could be said that your teaming is the modern-day version of Corman and Price.

SG: It’s fantastic if popular culture thought of us in that way. When we did the Lovecraft movies, I was sort of trying to emulate what Corman did with Poe, and I’m very happy that movies like Re-Animator and From Beyond have helped to popularize Lovecraft. Kids see our movies and then they start reading Lovecraft’s stories, but if there were no Edgar Allen Poe, there would be no H.P. Lovecraft. Poe was Lovecraft’s idol, and he tried to imitate his style in his writing.

DS: What do you think the perceptions are that people have of Edgar Allen Poe, and how do you think your show will change them?

Jeffrey Combs: Everyone seems to think they know Poe’s story, but then immediately they’ll get something wrong, like thinking the name of his wife was Annabelle Lee. Or they’ll think, “Oh, he just wrote these stories.” But Edgar Allen Poe was a profound poet, even if they don’t know much of his work beyond “The Raven.” Poe was also a literary critic, an editor, and created the detective story. He loved solving puzzles.

SG: There’s even a story about how Poe solved a murder in New York City, doing it Sherlock Holmes-style by deduction — or what he called “Ratiocination.”

JC: Ultimately, there would have been no Sherlock Holmes without Edgar Allen Poe. On top of all that, he was an incredibly tragic figure and incredibly unlucky. There weren’t a lot of happy accidents in his life — just a lot of accidents: losing his mother before he was three and being raised by a demanding foster family… Poe was a very complex guy.

SG: A lot of people think he was a drug addict, which is not really true. Poe had a drinking problem, which he acknowledged. He said it unleashed “the imp of the perverse” because he would get really close to succeeding at something and then get drunk and destroy everything. He lost many jobs because of it, and alienated a lot of his friends. That made people believe that drinking was what killed Poe at the age of 40, but even his death is a mystery. He disappeared for three days and was found at a pauper’s hospital in a coma, wearing someone else’s clothing. There were four people at his funeral, and one of them was Rufus Wimot Griswold — an author who despised Poe because he’d raked his work over the coals in his literary criticism. It was Griswold who wrote Poe’s obituary and created all these lies about him that people still believe to this day.

JC: There was a story about how Poe ripped off one of Griswold’s books and, the next day, he ran into him on the street, completely drunk. Poe asked Griswold if he could borrow money for another drink.

DS: It’s a rivalry that sounds like something out of Amadeus.

SG: The thing about Griswold is that no one would remember him if it weren’t for Poe, and when Griswold died, they found two pictures on his wall — one of his late wife and the other of Poe. They were the two most important people in his life, and this is the man who supposedly hated Poe. He wrote the first biography about Poe, which was also full of lies. It wasn’t until 100 years later that scholars found the truth.

JC: There was also a North-South thing going on. This was about ten years before the outbreak of The Civil War, and the tension that led to it was very much there when Poe came East from Richmond, Virginia. The literary circle of his day was all centered in New York and Boston, and people like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving had a closed circle.

SG: These were the people considered to be the great writers, and Poe, being the “Southern boy,” was seen as an intruder.

JC: It didn’t help that he’d written scathing reviews of their work before coming North, so they already had it out for him. In the end, I think Poe is America’s Van Gogh. They were both tortured artists, and while Poe was appreciated more than Van Gogh was in his lifetime, his acclaim wasn’t nearly at the level it should have been. Even Poe knew how under-appreciated he was. That’s what’s so amazing about Poe. He knew that he was better than everybody, and time has proven that.

SG: He is rightfully regarded as America’s greatest writer.

DS: Jeffrey, you first played Poe for Stuart in “The Black Cat” episode for Masters of Horror. Did that give you the impetus to do this show?

JC: It kind of started three years before that, when I’d read a lot of biographies on Poe. I have a real love for history and my actor’s desire to find an interesting character. So I mentioned to Stuart that no one had ever really made a film that would encompass Poe’s life.

SG: Poe’s life was like one of his stories. There were some things in it that were truly horrific. His young wife Virginia was also Poe’s first cousin, and he married her at 13. She was a wonderful singer. There’s a scene in “The Black Cat” where she starts spitting up blood while at the piano. She’d contracted what we’d call tuberculosis today, and Virginia struggled with this illness for years before she died at 23. Beyond that, when you see Jeff in costume and makeup, it’s striking what a resemblance he has to Poe. He’s exactly the same size and even has the same eye color. It’s incredible how Jeffrey channels him. So when we were doing “The Black Cat,” I actually felt like I was hanging out with Edgar Allen Poe. We had such a great time working on that episode that we wanted to see what more we could do with the character. That’s how the idea of a one-man show about Edgar Allen Poe came about. This year is also the bicentennial of Poe’s birth, and it’s being celebrated all over the world. So we thought, what if we did a one-man show that we could tour the country with for the bicentennial? And Nevermore is our start for the Year of Poe.

DS: How would you describe your acting-directing partnership?

JC: This time has really been different because we really did collaborate as creative partners on this. Before Dennis Paoli put pen to paper, Stuart and I would meet and discuss what stories and poems this evening would entail. What details of Poe’s life would we reveal, and what would the structure of the show be? How do we make it interesting so it’s not just me standing up on stage?

SG: We ended up deciding that we wanted to recreate one of Poe’s recitals because he did tour the country reciting his poems, the most famous one being “The Raven.” There are stories of him getting drunk at those recitals, and proposing marriage at one, so we started incorporating those ideas into the play to make it the ultimate “Poe experience” and to capture as much of the man as we could. We started in 1848, which was the year before Poe died and a year after his wife did, so this is a key period for him and a time when Poe wrote some of his greatest stories and poems.

JC: We wanted the show to feel like a “visitation” from Poe — something that could almost be a séance.

SG: Yet there are other “ghosts” on stage. A lot of this performance is about Sarah Helen Whitman, who was a wealthy heiress and poetess whom Poe wanted to marry after the death of his first wife, Virginia. We read that, at one of his recitals, she was sitting in the first row and Poe did the entire recital to Helen. He focused everything on her. It was almost like this kind of public lovemaking. But, of course, Virginia still haunts Poe. She always believed in him.

DS: What’s the framework of Nevermore?

JC: You’re at a recital, and Poe starts drinking halfway through, and that opens the door to the “imp,” which is very much the way it was with Poe. He could hold it together for a little while. Then he needs another one, and the imp gets loose.

SG: Being with Poe can be kind of a scary thing, and it’s important to know that 90% of what you hear on stage are actually things that Edgar Allen Poe had written or said. It’s Poe in his own words.

JC: I cut my teeth in theater, and it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been onstage, and I really needed to get back to that nourishment. It’s a challenge to come back to that. Doing a one-man show is a first for me. I’m used to doing plays where the actors go off and work on things, but there’s a real solitude to Nevermore. It’s a lonely endeavor.

DS: How do you think your fans will react to Nevermore?

SG: I think our fans will respond to the show because it’s extraordinary to experience how Jeffrey captures this man. He told me, while we were rehearsing, that doing Nevermore was like climbing a mountain because it’s a formidable task to entertain an audience for a 90-minute show — one without an intermission.

DS: Jeffrey, do you ever feel that you were possessed by Poe?

JC: Possessed? No, not really, but I do have a temperament sometimes.

SG: There’s a darkness of Poe just being Poe that takes you over sometimes.

JC: My wife would certainly say yes, because when you’re walking around trying to learn this dense material, you have to envelop yourself in it. You can’t be relaxed about it, and it can cloud everything. I have to shake that off sometimes.

SG: People reading about Poe think that he suffered from “bipolar disorder.” His behavior could change by the hour, and the drinking brought out his best and worst qualities. When things were going well, there was something inside of him that made him screw it all up. I think all of us have done that from time to time. Poe was a master of that.

DS: Do you hope to give Edgar Allen Poe the popularity that you’ve given to H.P. Lovecraft?

JC: Well, I don’t think he needs any help from us!

SG: We would love to do a movie about Poe’s life. I know that Sylvester Stallone has tried to make one for 20 years. Even Michael Jackson had attempted a biopic. It would be wonderful if Nevermore could eventually become that film.

DS: When people go to see a Stuart Gordon/Jeffrey Combs production, they’re expecting to get their buttons pushed. How is Nevermore going to do that?

SG: I think people are going to be uncomfortable with it. When Nevermore starts off, audiences might be expecting a show like Hal Holbrook doing “Mark Twain Tonight,” and then that expectation goes haywire.

JC: But there won’t be buckets of blood, if that’s what you’re implying!

SG: When we were doing “The Black Cat” with Jeffrey, I realized that this guy is Poe. Now, to be doing Nevermore with him on stage is like going full circle. The thing that’s great about live theater is that they’ll be in the same room, breathing the same air as Edgar Allen Poe, and he doesn’t always stay on the stage. Sometimes he’ll join the audience, so people are going to be surprised by Nevermore.

Nevermore debuts on Friday, July 10th at 8:00 p.m. at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood and runs to Sunday, August 2^nd. For more information and to buy tickets, go here.

Top photo from “Black Cat”